Category: General

Ever since I got my first leather-bound introductory copy of *Moby Dick* for $4.95, I have had an absolute fascination with the Easton Press. Without a doubt, they produce the highest quality (and costliest) printed books in the world. And boy have they suckered me in. My mom now hates buying me presents because of these things. I bought maybe 20 books in their [100 Greatest Books]( http://www.eastonpress.com/ViewProduct.asp?Sku=0001) when I was 12 or 13, until I ran out of money. But since then they have continued to come up with all this *great stuff* that I know I really want to have. Any book you want to have forever ought to be made to last forever, right? So I would beg my parents. Hey, they’re expensive, but they make me really easy to shop for. Continue reading “Easton Press”

Scott Kurtz is a cartoonist who has an online comic strip called [PVP](http://www.pvponline.com/) that I’ve been reading for a few years. PVP stands for Player vs. Player, and it involves a magazine about video games. So we have video games *and* a comic strip. How could you go wrong? Well, Kurtz found a way: [insult your reader’s religious convictions](http://www.pvponline.com/archive.php3?archive=20050628). Pretty brainy. Everyone knows the key to market success is to offend the greatest possible number of people with your product.

So Kurtz has [jumped the shark](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark) and gone to that happy land where self-expression is more important than entertaining readers. I’m happy for him, to be so secure that he can ignore the conformist pressures of the world. May he know the best of life’s successes, and come to a saving knowledge of our Lord, Jesus Christ. But, since I’m no longer entertained by him, I won’t be reading his comic anymore.

Ironically, I’m not offended. Just kind of sad. I like reading the same comics every morning. But I’ve had to drop 2-3 in the last six months. Obviously, PVP is one of them. Looks like I’ll have to branch out and find some comics to read online. (Suggestions?)

Of course, [Howard Taylor](http://www.schlockmercenary.com) remains my standard of a great comic writer who also leads an exemplary life (i.e., he’s a [religious nutcase](http://www.livejournal.com/users/howardtayler/104717.html)).

Apparently [Greg Dean](http://www.reallifecomics.com/daily.php?strip_id=1474) can relate to our situation.
As usual, he’s much funnier than I.

Also: a new [desktop cleaner](http://www.legrady.hu/sc.html) (h/t: [Wildcane](http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=wildcane)).

[Pseudo-Polymath](http://www.pseudopolymath.com/) (of whom I am very fond), has an intermittant set of posts he does called “morning links,” where he quickly runs through his morning reading and points out any notable developments. Sort of like a personal bonsai version of the [Instapundit](http://instapundit.com/). I always get a picture of Archie Bunker looking up over the newspaper and saying, “Hey Edith, get a load of this!” (I have no idea if that’s even the sort of thing he’d say.) I’m going to try this method of posting and see if it can work for me. There are always a whole host of things I read in a day that interest me that I’d love to point out to somebody (or somebodies), but I’m always loathe to post them individually, because it would run anything “important” I’ve said (and anything Valerie has said) down to the bottom of the page.

Hopefully, if I can squeeze everything down into one post, we won’t have that problem. So: Continue reading “Daily links”

I’m not very fond of magazines. I think it’s the short, pithy articles that usually turn me off. Invariably, a magazine will summarize exactly in the part where I want an in-depth discussion, and delve deep into some personal aspect on a question that I find completely irrelevant. Books are my friends. If an issue isn’t worth a few hundred pages of in-depth discussion, it’s probably not worth thinking about too much. At the very least, if it isn’t worth at least *implying* the need for several hundred pages of discussion, I can’t help thinking that somebody is playing the man-behind-the-curtain routine.

There is, of course, another reason for my antipathy toward magazines. Continue reading “Magazines”